Various mechanisms exist for booting a computing device. Servers, specifically, may be slow to boot the video components, which results in a lack of early visual feedback to a user or operator. Systems having video feedback earlier in the boot cycle appear to boot faster, and provide additional boot status to a user. Desktop and mobile systems tend to boot faster than servers. The lack of visual feedback may give the appearance that the system is not booting at all. In existing systems, desktop and mobile systems have less complicated memory subsystems than servers, and thus take less time to boot the BIOS. Server systems have more complicated memory subsystems and thus, take longer for the BIOS to initialize the memory subsystem and ultimately to boot up.
In existing systems, many tasks are required to be performed before the video subsystem can be initialized. Thus, the user is deprived of video status of the boot process until the video subsystem has booted. On average, a server may take 20-50+ seconds before video may be initialized. A user who is not familiar with the delayed video response time may think that the server has failed to boot and recycle the power button in error.